


Love & Other Highly Dangerous Habits of the Modern Spy

by themadlurker



Category: RED (2010)
Genre: F/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Romance, Spies, Translation Available, minor OC deaths, Перевод на русский | Translation in Russian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:57:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themadlurker/pseuds/themadlurker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes a lot of love to survive being shot - repeatedly - by the object of your affections.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love & Other Highly Dangerous Habits of the Modern Spy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [classysleuth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/classysleuth/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, classysleuth! I hope you have at least half as much fun reading this as I had writing it.
> 
> Thank you to [toft](http://archiveofourown.org/users/toft/) and my secret language consultant for all the beta help!
> 
> This work has been translated into Russian by [fandom_gerontophilia_2016](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fandom_gerontophilia_2016/): [Любовь и другие опасные привычки современного шпиона ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7686283)

He meets her at the Polish embassy in London. The USSR has just announced the birth of space station MIR and the Americans are murmuring discontent. You can tell which of the guests are reading the propaganda briefs and which are reading the important ones, based on the way they laugh. The too loud, too nervous laughs that say, "we'll all be friends soon, won't we?" are still thinking of finding a bunker to hide in; the quiet, careful laughs are the ones doing the real work, who know the bunkers would not help and are trying to get rid of the weapons.

She sails into the room between the speeches and the champagne, wearing a white dress that tumbles from her shoulders like one long, foaming waterfall of lace. She stands apart from the crowd, the little groups of scheming politicians and the merely rich and ignorant. He thinks, "what a woman!" and she turns, as if by magic, to look at him.

It is only later he thinks, oh yes, he had taken a step toward her, drawn on by an instinct for which he did not yet have a name.

"Do you dance?" he asks her.

She laughs and that is like a waterfall too. "There's no music," she points out.

"I wouldn't need music, to dance with you," he says but then, like magic, like a fairy tale, there is. The band have crept out onto the stage now that the speeches are done, unfolded their music and struck up an old Viennese waltz.

"Don't you think it might be a little politically unwise," she asks him, "to cross the lines on the dance floor?" She is still smiling.

"It would be much worse not to dance with you," he says. "That would be a crime against Beauty."

She laughs again, but lets him draw her into his arms and they revolve slowly to the strains of the old Europe while he holds her hand against his heart.

She slips away from him before he notices the music has ended and he is left standing alone and longing on the dance floor.

It is only later, when he finds the embassy guards dead upstairs, one of them beside a safe that used to contain detailed plans of certain Russian contracts with Polish manufacturers, that Ivan thinks to check the hidden inner pocket of his jacket and finds that it has been surgically slit open. His superiors will not be happy to learn that the carefully guarded rocket blueprints have disappeared. Fortunately for Ivan, however, his contact has met the same fate as the guards; there is nothing to say his contact did not receive the blueprints as promised or that they were not stolen from the safe along with everything else. Very fortunate for Ivan, that he will not have to produce an alternative explanation.

It is not so fortunate for his contact, of course.

Weeks later, he receives a card with no name that says "Thank you for the dance." He wears it next to his heart like a talismen. This is a woman who he must meet again.

* * *

The next time he sees her is through a hole in the Berlin wall. She is picking her way through the rubble where fervent hands have been tearing at the barrier and she has not seen, so he thinks, the tiny dot of red picking out a sniper rifle's focus over her heart. He misses the little flash of silver in her hand until something falls with a muffled thud from a derelict building behind him.

Ivan investigates the sound and finds a sniper wrapped in layers of a grey wool blanket that matches the worn concrete of the building. He scans the windows and roof for any sign of where the sniper stood, but finds nothing.

As he looks down at the body again, he notices a tiny red dot picked out on his own chest. A moment later, another thud brings the second sniper down to join his friend. Ivan had not seen the man in his hiding place, but someone had.

Ivan turns the body over carefully with the toe of his boot. The face is familiar. He was given a stack of about a dozen photographs before he came to East Germany; this is one of them. Not everyone in Europe is happy about the erosion of the Wall and all it represents. Especially the people being put out of a job by the new era of trust and unity. Some of them even try to make things difficult, start little problems around the old border.

A sigh behind him echoes his thoughts and Ivan tries not to jump at the noise.

"Some people just don't know when to let go," she says grimly, turning over the other body to check the face. It is another one from Ivan's stack of photographs; he must not be the only one who has seen them.

"What a pleasure to see you again," Ivan manages. He thinks he gets a hint of a smile in return, but then she vanishes into the derelict building and further thuds and strangled cries from within tell him that she is busy. He follows at his leisure and deals with the ones she has left him.

He doesn't see her again, that time, but he finds a scrap of paper tucked into the breast pocket of one of the bodies. It has nothing but an address in faintly familiar handwriting that directs him to a basement storeroom where the last of the troublemakers on his list has been tidily disposed of.

It is nice, sometimes, getting to be on the same side. International co-operation is a wonderful thing.

* * *

In 1993 Ivan is sent to raid a munitions factory in Prague suspected to be a base for American counter-espionage operations. He is not the only one. Five of his government's best agents, including his cousin Igor, enter the warehouse in which their information tells them there is a false floor, a secret office in a bunker underground from which details of Russian armaments have been flowing steadily to Washington.

The office is there. So is a man named Frank Moses, sitting with his feet propped arrogantly up on the bare desk, the rest of the office stripped bare around him.

The Americans have been expecting them.

"You know, I've been meaning to send you guys a thank you card to express our appreciation for your hospitality," says Mr. Moses. "We could never've got along so well in this town if you folks hadn't funded all these bunkers in the first place. It's heart warming, is what it is, to see this kind of co-operation."

Two inches to Ivan's left, his cousin, who has never been the brightest rocket in the bazooka, cracks his knuckles and advances on the nonchalant man behind the desk. A few loud and uncomfortable-sounding seconds later, Igor is lying on the floor, at peace with the world, or at least not conscious of it. Ivan would like, for the sake of family loyalties, to check whether he is breathing, but Frank Moses has stopped to light a cigarette and has practically turned his back on Ivan. Some people might mistake this for a tactical error and seize the opportunity to attack. Ivan has not survived this long by making that sort of mistake.

Ivan takes the casual gesture as a hint to glance over his shoulder and ducks at the same time as Mr. Moses, while the rest of his compatriots are levelled by a spray of machine-gun fire signalled by the lit match. Ivan crawls away from the shooting, getting up and breaking into a run as soon as he is sure there are no bullets coming for him above waist height. Behind him, he can hear footsteps pursuing.

He makes it back out into the warehouse and hesitates over the labyrinth of passages between storage containers. He has just decided that the back way will be the safest out when a stream of gunfire approaches along that path and he hastily changes direction. His pursuers take a different turning and then he is out under the open sky, making for cover in another building on the industrial complex.

He ducks into the first doorway he reaches...

...and finds a gun pointing at his head. _She_ is holding it.

A sniper rifle is leaned up against the doorframe, waiting its turn. Ivan realizes with a lump in his throat that she has watched him run all the way across the exposed open spaces and he has only arrived this far because, for some reason, she prefers the intimacy of the semiautomatic.

Ivan's heart sinks within his chest. He has hoped to see her again, of course. Not like this, he thinks. Not like this.

"I take it you are here to help your American friends?" Ivan asks without much hope of a negative.

"Call it — an expression of our trust in their independent operations," she says with dry humour. "They're very good at blowing things up, I'm just here to help... tidy up, in case they miss any little loose ends."

She is carrying a submachine gun in her other hand. Somehow he does not think she is there for the kind of cleaning that involves a damp mop.

"They know you are here to help them?" he asks. The Americans can be funny, sometimes, about fighting their own battles. Something to do with that little war of theirs two hundred years ago. They're still touchy on the subject.

"Oh no, it's much better to let them deal with these things themselves," she says graciously. "Unless they make too many mistakes and then it is our duty, as their friends and allies, to tidy up the mistakes."

"And I am... untidy?" he asks with a certain sense of fatal expectation.

"Oh, terribly," she says with a funny quirk of her lips. "We can't have stray KGB agents escaping unharmed from an attack on one of our allies."

"Ah." He can't say he regrets running into her, but it would have been nice, perhaps, to have survived this one.

She lowers the gun toward his heart and Ivan closes his eyes in resignation. There are not many things one can do to escape a bullet fired at close range. One could, perhaps, wear a bulletproof vest; he is not.

He can still see the afterimage of her standing there, dancing behind his eyelids: bright and beautiful, blonde hair swept into place with just a tendril or two escaping, as lovely in combat gear as she was in that dress, and with heavy weaponry in either hand.

She shoots him in the leg.

It is not what you might call a pleasant surprise; being shot is never exactly pleasant. The fact that he has survived is nothing he wishes to complain of, though.

He opens his eyes in the aftershock of pain only to find her gone and the rifle no longer leaning against the door. He looks back toward the warehouse, hoping for another glimpse, just in time to see the building explode in a brilliant ball of fire. As the smoke curls up, mixed with secondary explosions as the munitions factory goes up in flame, he catches a glimmer of hope snaking its way into his heart. Hope is a dangerous thing for a spy; it is not rational, it can lead to foolish, illogical decisions. Nevertheless he hopes.

He is alive. She must like him at least a little.

* * *

His second hint comes one afternoon a few months later, when he finds her sitting in a cafe outside his hotel in Paris. She is wearing a simple, modestly cut dress that nevertheless clings to every curve of her body, alluring. As he watches, she gives a little wave to the waiter to ask for more coffee. She gives no sign of having seen him, but Ivan is sure she knows he is there.

He also has no doubt that despite the cunningly draped dress, the smooth lines that leave so little to the imagination, she has several items of deadly weaponry secreted somewhere about her person. The small, elegant clutch she carries in her hand could contain a grenade. He goes over to her table and greets her with all the ease of an old friend.

She smiles with apparent delight. "Ivan, what a pleasant surprise," she exclaims. "I didn't know you were in Paris. Won't you join me?"

He would bet his eye teeth that she not only knew where he was, but has come expressly to see him. He only hopes that she is not here to shoot him, this time. He sits down. All around them, the world goes on as if this were not a remarkable occasion. A pair of French women pass by their table walking small dogs and discussing the price of bread.

He signals the waiter for another coffee and they sit in silence until the waiter returns. She lifts her cup and sips without taking her eyes off him. It is the eternal wariness of the tiger that has just met another and has not determined yet whether it is friend or foe. Can tigers ever be friends? Ivan wonders. He has heard that the female tiger can be the more deadly once it is roused. It seems like an appropriate metaphor.

He sips his own coffee and says, "Bah, too weak," looking down at the tiny cup of espresso.

She smiles at him and slides a sugar bowl across the table. It was not there a minute ago; presumably one of the neighbouring diners is now wondering where it has got to.

"A little more what you are used to?" she asks. Yes, he likes his turkish coffee strong and with so much sugar you can stand the spoon up in it. Did she already know that?

"I still don't know your name," he says, wonderingly. He asked around, after he was shot, as discreetly as he could. No one wanted to talk about it; they got nervous at her description: blonde, British, highly deadly. The doctors said he was lucky that she missed the femoral artery; Ivan thought he was lucky she had wanted to.

"Don't you?" she asks with an amused smile. "You can call me Victoria."

"And how do I know if that is your real name?" he asks her. A little joke between spies. Who uses their real name for anything anymore?

She smiles at him again. It is an alluring smile and he enjoys being the object of it so much that perhaps he will not mind if it is followed by a little pain.

"I trust your fine American friends are being suitably grateful for your help?" he asks. "That is, if they know you were there. Have they worked it out yet?"

"Probably," says Victoria with the slightest hint of a shrug. "If they bothered to examine the shell casings left behind after the explosion. Sometimes the Americans aren't as thorough as they should be."

"Hence your... helpfullness." Ivan wonders whether he should add his thanks for the bullet still working its way out of his leg that twinges when he puts too much weight on it. He decides he does not want to encourage any more ideas about shooting him. "They are lucky to have such good friends," he observes instead.

"We merely respond in kind," Victoria says. Ivan can't help noticing the double meaning. "The Americans have always been great friends to her Majesty's government. Well, at least since they got over that little war of theirs and started acting like civilized people again."

"You and I are not civilized people," Ivan points out, although it amuses him to think of it. They are sitting in a cafe in Paris, the rest of the world passing them by without a second thought, unaware no doubt that either one of them is poised to break out into violence at the wrong word, the wrong movement, the wrong face in the crowd.

"No, not by the ordinary idea of civilization," she agrees, "although a historian might say we are very good at letting the rest of the world pretend to be. Civilization does not come without its cost."

He salutes the thought with the last of his coffee, drinking it like the last shot of vodka in a bottle, a gesture of finality. He puts down the cup and stands, waiting to see what will come next. There must be something more to this meeting; people in their line of work do not come all this way to have a cup of coffee.

She rises as well, slips a bill beneath her coffee cup, and gazes into the middle distance, not quite meeting his eyes. Her fingers run over the edge of her bag as if to reassure herself of its contents. She could be scanning the people in the square for possible threats, she could be preparing to strike — but there is something uncertain about the movements. She is nervous, Ivan thinks with a little _frisson_ of surprise. He examines the idea and finds it strange, but flattering.

"I had thought," she says at length, slowly, "we might go dancing."

It is not an invitation to refuse, even if he wanted to. One does not refuse a woman like this, beautiful, deadly, when she invites you to dance. One does not refuse her anything.

It is not so late, Ivan thinks. The first hints of evening are there in the greying light, the relative coolness of the air that follows the warmest hours of the day. He knows a club where there is jazz, dancing, but it will not be open for a few hours yet.

" _Alors_ ," he says, holding out his arm for her, formally, " _vous voudriez prendre un petit dîner avant de danser?_ "

She takes his proffered arm, lightly, but he can feel her fingertips brand themselves all the way down to the bone. They walk across the square like an ordinary couple of old friends or lovers, but Ivan suspects already that nothing about this will be so simple as that.

* * *

The next time he sees her, after those glorious, heady days in Paris, she puts three bullets in his chest.

When he wakes up and finds himself, not comfortable, but alive, that is when he knows she loved him and still does. She has never said it, and he was never sure, although she put up with him saying it, and calling her " _зайчек мой_ ". He _hoped_.

He should have known she would find it easiest to express her feelings with a gun in her hand.

Ten, almost twenty years pass. He does not see her again, because he had his orders just as she did. Maybe he was not able to pull the trigger, but she was, and three bullets make a very clear message. Still, he does not stop loving her, and he does not forget.

* * *

Victoria wakes with a groan, wrapped in furs in the cabin he keeps as a safe house — doubling as an ice house in winter — in the northern States.

The bullet wound has made her feverish, but not dangerously so. Once when he woke her to feed her a little broth, she murmured and curled against his arm like a kitten. Another time he found a handgun pressed against his temple before she was fully awake. She has been awake, once, long enough to watch the snow falling outside the window before she drifted back into a healing sleep.

This time, at last, she sits up and tries impatiently to tidy her hair and what is left of her dress. Ivan had to cut quite a lot of it away to clean and dress the wound, although he left what he could to preserve her modesty. He regrets the loss of the dress as much as he can regret anything necessary to save her life; it reminded him of the dress she wore the first time he saw her and he is, he admits it to himself, a sentimental man.

"The others?" she asks, once she has looked around and failed to find any sign of them.

"Already on their way," says Ivan, "that little favour I mentioned."

"You're incorrigible," Victoria says reprovingly. It comes out sounding fond.

She sighs and stretches, a little painfully on the side where he removed the bullet. "There's really no one coming after us?" she asks.

"You find this disappointing?" Ivan replies. "You would rather have the entire CIA after you?"

"Not disappointing, exactly. Just a little insulting, really," Victoria sighs. "When I left MI6 they sent hit squads to my house for months. It was nice to know they missed me, after a fashion."

"Ah," he says, understanding dawning at last. "How many did they send after you?"

"There was no large scale operation like this one, they simply offered incentives to some of their best assassins — working for duty or for hire — to... eliminate a problem."

"What happened to them?" Ivan asks, suspecting that he already knows the answer.

"I eliminated them," Victoria says, matter-of-fact.

"I'm very sorry," Ivan says, as consolingly as he thinks he can get away with.

"So am I," she admits, "they were diverting. Now that MI6 has decided it's too expensive to send people every few months, life just isn't the same."

"Life is never the same," Ivan admits. It is true he has not been... popular since he failed — equally failed — to remove his personal complication with Victoria. Only he was not as elegant, not as emphatic as she in his failure. He woke up with three bullets in his chest, and knew that she loved him, and knew he could never do the same to her.

Now he is nothing but an embarrassment at home, the price he pays for being part of the old guard, the ones who failed to hold together the great USSR — as if such a thing could be accomplished with any number of spies if they have nothing to work with but sticky tape and a very long piece of string. Worse, he has accepted the decline, does not fight to regain their former glory. So he is shuffled off to foreign lands, confined to embassies, consulates, tidy patches of Russian soil where he can still rule a corner of the former republic with an iron fist — from a safe distance, on a smaller scale.

The only ones of his era left in the motherland are the very old who still believe in the country that has shuffled them aside for a younger generation: ambitious, innovative, ready to take their cues from the Americans if need be. Economists, many of them.

Well, let them keep their ledgers at home. Ivan is not so toothless yet as the accountants suppose. He still has his contacts. He arranges little matters for important people, makes sure the right people get put in and out of power. They are not wars, not even cold ones. They _are_ , regrettably, messy affairs, but it is never Ivan who gets to dirty his hands these days, more's the pity.

Somewhere in Moldova now, Frank Moses is doing him a little favour regarding a little local governor who misinterpreted the terms of an agreement with Ivan. By the morning, his nuclear materials will have quietly — or not so quietly — vanished.

As for Victoria, age has not withered her — what was that the poet said about variety? Victoria's company has never grown stale; they have never stayed together long enough to try. Ivan thinks he would like to try, to see if he can grow accustomed to her.

She is watching him with an inscrutable look on her face. For all the bandages on her side are fresh, Ivan does not doubt she will get up despite the pain and walk out the door if he says the wrong thing.

He does not say, "I love you, Victoria" or "I would like to spend the rest of my life with you." These things are true, but not always enough, as they both know.

"I have been thinking of paying a visit to a weaponsmith I know in Egypt," he says instead, carefully. "If you would like, it could be a little holiday for the new year. He makes some wonderfully... unique items I think you would enjoy. It is a little late for a gift for your Christmas, perhaps, but it could make a good house-warming present. Or a welcome home."

Victoria laughs, a joyous, thrilling sound. "I have been getting a little tired of flower-arranging," she admits, "and I could use a new sniper rifle."

"We could hang it over the mantle," Ivan suggests.

"Oh no, not there," Victoria says, shaking her head very seriously, her voice absolutely grave. "It wouldn't go with the decorating scheme at all. We'll have to put it in the basket behind the door, with the long kindling sticks for the fire and the rest of the hunting rifles."

The uncertainty Ivan felt in his chest unknots itself and becomes a warm glow. _We._

This is when he knows that, this time at least, she will stay.

**Author's Note:**

> >   
> _Mec._     Now Antony must leave her utterly.  
>  _Eno._     Never; he will not:  
> Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale  
> Her infinite variety
> 
> (Antony and Cleopatra, II.ii.269-72)


End file.
